Category: Quotes

We haven’t met since 11 years. I don’t know if you have changed during that time, but I certainly have tremendously. I am sorry to say I am no better than I was, but I am different. And therefore if we shall meet you may find that the man who has come to see you isn’t really the one you meant to invite. There is no doubt that, even if we can make ourselves understood to one another, a chat or two will not be sufficient for the purpose, and that the result of our meeting will be disappointment and disgust on your side and disgust and despair on mine.

Wittgenstein, from a letter to Keynes

I am one of those cases which perhaps are not all that rare today: I had a task, did not do it, and now the failure is wrecking my life. I ought to have done something positive with my life, to have become a star in the sky. Instead of which I remained stuck on earth, and now I am gradually fading out. My life has really become meaningless and so it consists only of futile episodes.

Wittgenstein, in a letter to Engelmann

I am in a state of mind that is terrible to me. I have been through it several times before: it is the state of not being able to get over a particular fact. It is a pitiable state, I know. But there is only one remedy that I can see, and that is of course to come to terms with that fact. But this is just like what happens when a man who can’t swim has fallen into the water and flails about with his hands and feet and feels that he cannot keep his head above water. That is the position I am in now. I know that to kill oneself is always a dirty thing to do. Surely one cannot will one’s own destruction, and anybody who has visualised what is in practice involved in the act of suicide knows that suicide is always a rushing of one’s own defences. But nothing is worse than to be forced to take oneself by surprise.

Of course it all boils down to the fact that I have no faith

Wittgenstein, in a letter to Engelmann

His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, event theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific philosophical problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answer came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically … But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through a divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment or analysis of it would be a profanation.

Carnap on Wittgenstein

In Kafka's stories it is not so much the things and events in themselves which are disturbing as the fact that his characters react to them as they would to normal things and events, with little emotion. What makes the reading of his stories such a gruesome experience is his manner of treating the grotesque as everyday normality; not the fact that Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning transformed into a beetle, but that he sees nothing surprising in his fate. This principle, which might be termed the principle of 'soundless explosion', consists in withholding even a pianissimo where a fortissimo is expected; there is no change of volume at all — the world simply goes on as before.

Kafka achieves his deliberately unsensational effect by a method of literary inversion of the kind we have already mentioned; that is, subject and object are inverted or interchanged, as in all fables. This may sound like a purely grammatical point, but in fact it is much more. In order to convey the truth, 'Men are like beasts', Aesop shows us that 'Beasts are men'; by representing robbers as ordinary citizens, Brecht in his Threepenny Operashows that 'Ordinary citizens are robbers'. In order to bring home to us that the things which are accepted as a matter of course in our world are horrible, Kafka inverts the terms and treats blatant horrors as a matter of course. .. If we are shown without further explanation how in reality men are not rendered speechless by the unspeakabale, nor horrified by what is horrifying, this revelation is in itself both eloquent and terrible, and indeed more telling than if Kafka had made the victim of the execution-machine in the Penal Colony roar like an Ajax.

What Kafka describes is not so much what is, i.e. the world to which the individual belongs and owes his being, as the state of not-belonging, that is, of not being. Or more exactly: he describes, first, how the world of being appears to the outsider (i.e. as an alien world); and, secondly, the desperate efforts which this unsubstantial and homeless creature makes in order to gain acceptance in this world.

If Kafka's world is transfigured it is not with the radiance of eternity; for him it is the very temporal, commonplace world which has become 'infinitely' remote, inaccessible, mysterious. And this because he (or his hero K.) stands so far outside it, that the 'here-and-now' assumes the character of a 'beyond'. Not, however (and the point should be stressed), the character of an ultimate paradise to be attained, least of all in the 'worldly' sense of a Utopian Socialist future. In no sense is it the world to come which is Kafka's 'beyond', but the actual world. In the same way he 'who is to come' is himself, the alien; it is he who has yet to arrive in the world, and to make himself part of the world.

Kafka's heroes are the victims of a kind of original sin, though not in the Christian sense. Simply because from the start they are shut out of paradise (which in their case is the world), they are guilty, and every cuplable act is the result of this prior situation. 

Whereas allegory presents humanized abstractions, Kafka's stories represent abstract human beings. These men and women are 'abstract' in the sense suggested by the original Latin word abstrahere: they have been removed, torn away from the fulness of human existence. any of them are indeed nothing but functions: this man is a messneger and nothing else, that woman is a useful contact and nothing else.
… Societies have reached the dreadful state where a man who has no particular function to perform may be regarded as not real, as nothing, as unworthy of life.

It is the reply of those deprived of their power, of those who are irresponsible because no responsibility is left to them — in short, of those who do not really live but whose lives are used by others.
If a man is nothing but his profession, if his being is nothing more than the role for which he is 'cut out', then he himself is indeed a nonentity, existing not in his own right but, as it were, by permissions of the authorities, an authorized copy of his own official papers.

We might liken the lightness of Kafka's style to the lightness of a man who, compared with the weightiness of the world, has been weighed and found wanting; its gaiety is not that of a serious man, but of the man who is not taken seriously.

From Gunter Ander's Kafka, via Flowerville

 

Here I feel different every day. Sometimes things inside me are in such a ferment that I think I am going mad: then the next day I am totally apathetic again. But deep inside me there’s a perpetually seething, like bottom of a geyser, and I keep on hoping that things will come to an eruption once and for all, so that I can … into a different person. I can’t write you anything about logic today. Perhaps you regard this thinking about myself as a waste of time – but how can I be a logician before I’m a human being? Far the most important thing is to settle accounts with myself!

From a letter Wittgenstein wrote to Russell

Moore left, by way of Newcastle, on 24 March. After much sea-sickness he arrived at Bergen at 1PM on 26 March and was met by Wittgenstein, who talked, as Moore’s diary puts it, till 1AM. They stayed in Bergen another day, shopping in the morning; then Wittgenstein talked till 6.30PM. More shopping and dinner till 8: ‘he abuses me till 12.15’. A strange reception, it may seem, for a guest: a stranger still reaction from a younger man to an older. It is as if all Wittgenstein’s moral force had been banked up over the winter and was now loosed irresistibly on Moore.

From Brian McGuinness's Young Ludwig

A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.

[…] 

Once again I want to call up the figure of Alonzo Quijada; see him mount his Rosinante and set off in search of great battles. He is prepared to sacrifice his life for a noble cause, but tragedy doesn't want him. For, since its birth, the novel is suspicious of tragedy: of its cult of grandeur; of its theatrical origins; of its blindness to the prose of life. Poor Alonzo Quijada. In the vicinity of his mournful countenance, everything turns into comedy.

Milan Kundera

Never till now, anywhere, had K. seen the administration and life so thoroughly enmeshed, so enmeshed that it sometimes seemed that administration and life had changed places.

Kafka, The Castle

If my notebook is to be in order, I must, as it were, step straight out doors from it – into life – and not have either to climb up into the light as if from a cellar or to jump down onto the earth again from a higher level.

Wittgenstein, notebooks.

I take no sides. I am interested in the shape of ideas even if I do not believe them.

Beckett, to Harold Hobson in 1956, in Beckett At Sixty

What I am saying does not mean that there will henceforth be no form in art. It only means that there will be new form, and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos, and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. The form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. That is why the form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist.

Samuel Beckett, quoted by Tom F Driver, 'Beckett by the Madeleine',  Columbia University Forum, 4.3 (1961), 23.

Confronted as he was with power on all sides, [Kafka's] obduracy sometimes offered him a reprieve. But if it was insufficient, or if it failed him, he trained himself to disappear; here the most helpful aspect of his physical thinness is revealed, though often, as we know, he despised it. By means of physical dimunition, he withdrew power from himself, and thus had less part in it; this asceticism, too, was directed against power …

Most astounding of all is another method he practices, with a sovereign skill matched only by the Chinese: transformation into something small. Since he abominated violence, but did not credit himself with the strength to combat it, he enlarged the distance between the stronger entity and himself by becoming smaller and smaller in relation to it.

Through this shrinkage he gained two advantages: he evaded the threat by becoming too diminutive for it, and he freed himself from all exceptionable means of violence; the small animals into which he liked to transform himself were harmless ones.

Canetti, Kafka's Other Trial

'It cannot be claimed that we are lacking in belief. The mere fact of our being alive is an inexhausible font of belief'.

'The fact of our being alive a font of belief? But what else can we do but live?'

'It's in that "what else" that the immense force of belief resides: it is exclusion that gives it its form.

Kafka, Zurau Aphorisms

There is a fine Jewish proverb: Man thinks, God laughs. Inspired by that adage, I like to imagine that Francois Rabelais heard God's laughter one day, and thus was born the idea of the first great European novel. It pleases me to think that the art of the novel came into the world as the echo of God's laughter. But why does God laugh at the sight of man thinking? Because man thinks and the truth escapes him. Because the more men think, the more one's man thought diverges from another's. And finally, because man is never what he thinks he is …

from Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

'Write'. – 'For whom?' – 'Write for the dead, for those in the past whom you love'. – 'Will they read me?' – 'No!'

Kierkegaard, rejected epigraph to Fear and Trembling

The admirable Cioran […] said to me in an interview twenty years ago that Heidegger does not really think, that he thinks about thought, that he is, in a certain sense, an impostor.

Hans-Juergren Heinrichs, interviewing Peter Sloterdijk

Musil, Döblin, Hesse wrote from the rim of the abyss. And that is commendable, since almost nobody wagers to write from there. But Kafka writes from out of the abyss itself. To be more precise: as he’s falling. When I finally understood that those had been the stakes, I began to read Kafka from a different perspective. Now I can read him with a certain composure and even laugh thereby. Though no one with a book by Kafka in his hands can remain composed for very long.

Bolano, interviewed.

I'm working with impotence, ignorance […] I think anyone nowadays who pays the slightest attention to his own experience finds it the experience of a non-knower, a non-can-er.

Beckett to Israel Shenker in 1956 (via Graver and Federman's Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage).

What merits our renewed and endlessly renewable consideration are not [Wittgenstein's] clarifying, negative propositions, which limit philosophy to a logical analysis of scientific language and restrict the analysis of the real world to specialised scientific fields; but rather his despairing attempt to hcart the limits to linguistic expression, which provides the Tractatus with its inner tension, a tension into which he eventually disappears.

Ingeborg Bachmann, interviewed.

The German lyric … cannot, despite all its invocation of the tradition to which it belongs, speak the language which many a sympathetic ear continues to expect from it. Its language has become soberer, plainer; it mistrusts the 'beautiful', it tries to be true. It is, then … so to speak, a 'grayer' language, a language which, among other things, wants to see its 'musicality' settled in a different place, a place where it no longer has anything in common with that 'harmony' which sounded more or less unchallenged, side by side with the most dreadful.

Paul Celan

Thomas Bernhard, from an interview in 1971, asked why he didn't write something about Wittgenstein:

It's as if I would have to write something (propositions!) about myself, and that won't work…. The question is not: do I write about Wittgenstein for even a single moment without disturbing him (W.) or myself (B.)…. Wittgenstein is a question that can't be answered…. so I don't write about Wittgenstein because I can't, but because I can't answer.

Language is what determines this regulated world, whose significations provide the foundation for our cultures, our activities and our relations, but it does so in so far as it is reduced to a means of these cultures, activities and relations; freed from these servitudes, it is nothing more than a deserted castle whose gaping cracks let in the wind and the rain: it is no longer the signifying word, but the defenceless expression death wears as a disguise.

Bataille, reviewing Beckett's Molloy

Q. Are you interested in Facebook?

A. No, not remotely. It gives me the uncanny feeling that normal people have become so unimportant for those in power and business that self-presentation is the last resort.

Friedrich Kittler interviewed 

What's interesting about Shakespeare is that he's interested in madness as a language. What Shakespeare is saying is […] that mad people speak in an extraordinary way. And one of the things about mad people is that they seem able to perform being mad as well as as it were being mad or we wonder really what they want us to think they're saying. 

They perplex us […] Mad people are very important to Shakespeare, because it is as though they enact how perplexing language is, especially when it's as its most intensely poetic.

Adam Phillips, from a South Bank Special on Art and Insanity here.

With my full philosophical rucksack I can only climb slowly up the mountain of mathematics.

No one can think a thought for me in the way no one can don my hat for me.

My ideal is a certain coolness. A temple providing a setting for the passions without meddling with them.

I once said, perhaps rightly: The earlier culture will become a heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes, but spirits will hover over the ashes.

We are struggling with language. / We are engaged in a struggle with language.

Religion as madness is a madness springing from irreligiousness.

What would it feel like not to have heard of Christ? / Should we feel left alone in the dark? / Do we escape such a feeling simply in the way a child escapes it when he knows there is someone in the room with him.

Within Christianity it's as though God says to men: Don't act a tragedy, that's to say, don't enact heaven and hell on earth. Heaven and hell are my affair.

Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.

Working in philosophy […] is really more a working on oneself. On one's own interpretation. On one's way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.)

The idea is worn out by now and no longer usable. […] Like silver paper, which can never quite be smoothed out again once it has been crumpled. Nearly all my ideas are a bit crumpled.

A confession has to be a part of your new life. 

I never more than half succeed in expressing what I want to express. Actually not as much as that, but by no more than a tenth. That is still worth something. Often my writing is nothing by 'stuttering'.

I don't believe I have ever invented a line of thinking, I have always taken one over from someone else. […]

Incidentally, when I was in Norway during the year 1913-14 I had some thoughts of my own, or so at least it seems to me now. I mean I have the impression that at the time I brought to life new movements in thinking (but perhaps I am mistaken). Whereas now I seem just to apply old ones.

The delight I take in my thoughts is a delight in my own strange life. Is this joy of living?

Don't play with what lies deep in another person!

The face is the soul of the body.

I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition. It must, as it seems to me, be possible to gather from this how far my thinking belongs to the present, future or past. For I was thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot quite do what he would like to be able to do.

If you offer a sacrifice and are pleased with yourself about it, both you and your sacrifice will be cursed.

The edifice of your pride has to be dismantled. And that is terribly hard work.

The horrors of hell can be experienced within a single day; that's plenty of time.

The light work sheds is a beautiful light, which, however, only shines with real beauty if it is illuminated by yet another light.

The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear. […]

Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.

I find it important in philosophising to keep changing my posture, not to stand for too long on one leg, so as not to get stiff. […]

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.

Nobody can truthfully say of himself that he is filth. Because if I do say it, though it can be true in a sense, this is not a truth by which I myself can be penetrated: otherwise I should either have to go mad or change myself.

You cannot write anything about yourself that is more truthful than you yourself are. That is the difference between writing about yourself and writing about external objects. You write about yourself from your own height. You don't stand on stilts or on a ladder but on your bare feet.

In philosophy the winner of the race is the one who can run most slowly. Or: the one who gets there last.

There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man – but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.

No one can speak the truth; if he has still not mastered himself. He cannot speak it; – but not because he is not yet clever enough. / The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in falsehood and reaches out from falsehood towards truth on just one occasion.

Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.

Schopenhauer is quite a crude mind, one might say. I.e. though he has refinement, this suddenly becomes exhausted at a certain level and then he is as crude as the crudest. Where real depth starts, his comes to an end. / One could say of Schopenhauer: he never searches his conscience.

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

I believe that my originality (if that is the right word) is an originality belonging to the soil rather than to the seed. (Perhaps I have no seed of my own.) Sow a seed in my soil and it will grow differently than it would in any other soil. […]

Within all great art there is a WILD animal: tamed. […]

A teacher may get good, even astounding, results from his pupils while he is teaching them and yet not be a good teacher; because it may be that, while his pupils are directly under his influence, he raises them to a height which is not natural to them, without fostering their own capacities for work at this level., so that they immediately decline as soon as the teacher leaves the classroom. […]

One might say: 'Genius is talent exercised with courage'.

Aim at being loved without being admired.

Sometimes an expression has to be withdrawn from language and sent for cleaning, – then it can be put back into circulation.

How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes!

Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.

You must say something new and yet it must all be old. / In fact you must confine yourself to saying old things – and all the same it must be something new. […]

As we get old, problems slip from our fingers again, as they used to when we were young. It isn't just that we can't crack them, we cannot even keep hold of them.

Don't demand too much, and don't be afraid that what you demand justly will melt into nothing.

Philosophers use a language that is already deformed as though by shoes that are too tight.

You can't build clouds. And that's why the future you dream of never comes true.

Virtually in the same way as there is a difference between deep and shallow sleep, there are thoughts which occur deep down and thoughts which bustle about on the surface.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push it.

Thoughts that are at peace. That's what someone who philosophises yearns for.

A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense.

If in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness.

My account will be hard to follow: because it says something new but still has egg-shells from the old view sticking to it.

some notes of Wittgenstein from Culture and Value

You used to be believe that with age you would become less unhappy, because you then would have reasons to be sad. When you were still young, your suffering was inconsolable because you believed it to be unfounded.

Only the living seem incoherent. Death closes the series of events that constitutes their lives. So we resign ourselves to finding a meaning for them. To refuse them this would amount to accepting that a life, and thus life itself, is absurd. Yours had not yet attained the coherence of things done. Your death gave it this coherence.

In art, to reduce is to perfect. Your disappearance bestowed a negative beauty on you.

Your suicide was an action, but an action with a contrary effect: a form of vitality that produces its own death.

You are not among those who ended up sick and old, with withered ghostly bodies, resembling death before they've stopped living. Their demise is the fulfilment of their decrepitude. A ruin that dies: is this not deliverance, is it not the death of death? As for you, you departed in vitality. Young, lively, healthy. You death was the death of life. Yet I like to think that you embodied the opposite: the life of death. I don't try to explain to myself in what form you might have survived your suicide, but your disappearance is so unacceptable that the following lunacy was born along with it: a belief in your eternity.

Stray paragraphs from Eduard Leve's Suicide

That is an interesting question because it assumes that neoliberalism produces despair.  I wish it did but I am not convinced that it does.  I think that the process that some of us have called neoliberalization actually seizes on something that is just a little to one side of despair that I might call something like a quotidian nihilism.   By quotidian, I mean it is a nihilism that is not lived as despair; it is a nihilism that is not lived as an occasion for deep anxiety or misery about the vanishing of meaning from the human world.  Instead, what neoliberalism is able to seize upon is the extent to which human beings experience a kind of directionlessness and pointlessness to life that neoliberalism in an odd way provides.  It tells you what you should do: you should understand yourself as a spec of human capital, which needs to appreciate its own value by making proper choices and investing in proper things. Those things can range from choice of a mate, to choice of an educational institution, to choice of a job, to choice of actual monetary investments – but neoliberalism without providing meaning provides direction. In a sad way it is seizing upon a certain directionlessness and meaninglessness in late modernity. 

Wendy Brown, interviewed

When word reached Sun Ra of John Coltrane's death, he was distraught. Even though they had only met a few times Sun Ra felt that Coltrane was truly remarkable, both as a man and a musician, and that he even had messianic qualities. At some moments he seemed to take the responsibility for his death on himself – claimed that he should have given him more warnings, or that the secret knowledge that he had told him was too much for him to handle; but at other times he said that Coltrane had been warned, that if he had joined the Arkestra it would never have happened, and it was his own fault. The Arkestra played at a memorial for Coltrane at the University of Pennsylvania shortly after his death, and for years afterwards Sun Ra would suddenly bring up Coltrane's passing in conversation as an object lesson – whether to himself or to others was not always clear.

from John F. Szwed's Space is the Place

Well, yes, I get horribly depressed. Books come along, and I open them in bookstores, and you see something sort of respectably done, it’s not like it’s badly done, but it makes me want to cut my throat.

Helen DeWitt, interviewed